Swift After Rome
by delyrical
Summary: There was a boy who listened by the window every afternoon. He was anyone after he disappeared. AU For Juncici.
1. any and many

HEY LOOK. I'm back! This is only a tentative thing, though, as I'm currently also in Beijing and being suffocated by the heat, business, being sick, and my little brother, in that order. Yup. HOWEVER, as everyone else is working on chaptered summer fics, my subconscious decided to jump on the bangwagon too.

This fic is a gift for Jun-chan (as promised!), whose ebullience has no match. Enjoy, enjoy, enjoy.

This is going to be a series of drabbles; some long, some short. And yes, I know that this takes place in Venice but the title mentions Rome. There's a reason, I promise! Oh, and last thing: if you don't want spoilers, please don't google for the rest of the poem.

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Swift After Rome

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anyone lived in a pretty how town  
(with up so floating many bells down)  
spring summer autumn winter  
he sang his didn't he danced his did.  
- e. e. cummings

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"_One_…"

The water lapped at the sky—or perhaps vice versa, as both were a murky navy that had swallowed the horizon, encasing Venice in a circle of rippling stars that sloped past the winged lions and wingless angels—

—_who slept, watching_—

into heaven.

"_Fourteen_…"

There were candles burning in the old theater by the canal, each flicker echoed by the gondolas tied to the edge of the water knocking together with the waves—faint hollow sounds as for temple meditating, wood on wood,

Wood on wood.

"_Thirty-one_…"

It was orange dancing across a curtain that looked like the sky, all dark and flecked with white. There was a bit of rustling, shuffling, bulging in the fabric as the curtain: sky rippled in the burning dark, shelter for resting, tired hearts

_(boys, four, with soft faces and hardened feet). _

"What are you talking about? Give that here—what, forgot how to count? It's _twenty_-one, not _thirty_-one, you blundering idiot. Why did we let you count our earnings again?"

Hattori Heiji cast a sullen look at Hakuba Saguru, half-hidden by shadows. "I'd've _liked _it to be thirty-one…"

"Yeah, we all would, but that doesn't make it so, huh? Keep your fantasies in your head where they can fill some space."

A scowling murmur, inked into the smoky air. "Yessir, Signor Stick-up-my-arse."

"What?"

"You heard 'im, _Signor_." An infuriating grin, unfurling between the leaning shoulders of Kuroba Kaito as he played into the banter. His friend—fellow conspirator, runaway, orphan—drew his mouth into a thin line, bringing candlelight to his chin.

"Alright guys, could we carry this on at a later time? 'Cause I want to finish and sleep. And Saguru, lighten up."

The fourth in the tiny circle of hunched shoulders and furious whispers cut in, tendrils of voice the most carrying in the rest of the black, cavernous theater. Kudo Shinichi fingered the edge of the moth-eaten sky as he drew closer to the others on the side of the stage.

"I _am _lightened up—"

"Shinichi, you're boring."

"Huh?"

Kaito shoved him in response. He was shoved back. A tussle followed, fists grabbing shirts and arms flying behind the dripping wax. The remaining two of the group glanced at each other and were momentarily brought together in exasperation towards their other friends.

"So, twenty-one, right?"

"Yup."

"Okay then, _twenty-two_, _twenty-five_, _twenty-six_…"

One and a half hour later, the candles were blown out in the abandoned theater Stella,

(—_And darkness smoothed the eyelids of young, motherless boys…_)

leaving that corner of Venice quiet for the latter night.


	2. and one more

Whoah, fast update. |D Going to Shanghai on Wednesday so I won't be able to update for maybe two weeks. Oh, and the piano teacher in here is based off of mine. She's an...interesting character. o.o

REVIEWWW.

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all by all and deep by deep  
and more by more they dream their sleep  
noone and anyone earth by april  
wish by spirit and if by yes.

-e. e. cummings

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It is a curious thing, the things one will do for their daughters: die, starve, rage, cry, buy them fifteen shining dresses and shut them away in a place filled with angry women and angry men only wanting best for the children—the children, who are rebuilt with strings and rosin and weaved through with something strange and beautiful called—

Here is something true; (_con dolore_): Nakamouri Ginzo is well versed in the sacrifices of fatherhood.

Here is another: Nakamouri Aoko understands this, and has learned a little on giving up too.

(Everything is music when you finally see them.)

The building has breathed for seventy-five years, and she has lived in it for four of them. Four years of her life that she has not seen her _babbo_ but has read of his exploits in the paper every morning, the red-faced head of the _vaporetti_ who saved the city while grinding his black teeth on cigars and raining swears on all his comrades, stalking about in a picture of some sort of livid, unsatisfied hero who never knew the meaning of 'bombastic' but had a beautiful daughter, sure she looks just like her late ma and don't tell anyone but he missed her quite a bit actually, and if _youtouchedonehaironherheadI'd_—

Aoko smiles during breakfast, and folds the paper by her seat. Her first tooth had fallen in the conservatory, and it is almost all she knows now at the age of nine, years from the night when he went _darling, I have a dangerous job and your ma's just passed and it's going to hurt me too when you leave, come here for a hug_—

(It doesn't bother her anymore that so many things had gone unfinished.)

The music is almost all she knows now at the age of nine, and a great, gentle animal waiting in black and white her only friend. It's a terribly lonely life to be a protégé of songs, bound by running keys and pages and pages of sheets filled with the indents of ink furiously circling measures and notes,

(and she remembers that one time in a fit of passion her teacher: _musicista_ had flung his pen at the paper and there still remained a tiny hole on the fifth page of Beethoven's Sonata No. 8 in C Minor, 1st movement).

Aoko goes to bed with crescendos and directions for _andante_ and _vivace_ and_ allegro, ma non troppe_ racing through her mind, but strangely she doesn't dream. She feels that Tchaikovsky/Chopin/Mendelssohn could possibly be breaking the thin bones in her spine to pieces but for some reason it doesn't matter to her, since being drowned by the music of maestros could also be a wondrous thing.

She thinks.

"Start over again, from eighty-seven."

The conservatory is made of beige brick and stone, with arched doorways and gilded ceilings. It is an epitome of a place where something should be revered, and in the lobby by the courtyard people often talk in whispers. There are windows that stretch all along the sides of the building, huge and thin and beckoning towards the passerby that hears strands of music being milked out from them into the street.

"No. Stop. You don't get it. Why do you still not get it? There is fury in the beginning of this movement, surprise, _scare_ the audience—no, stop hunching, relax your shoulders or the sound will never come out and your fingers will collapse in the middle of these chords. Listen girl, _listen—_I don't have time to play deaf with you—"

Aoko has learned to not interrupt. The room is hot and she knows it is not because of summer.

"—Right here, right here is where the key _explodes_ into B major—remember your ring finger and the flats—"

_But this was the most funda_—

"—This is the most fundamental thing, I don't know why I am going over this with you—Aoko, what is wrong with you today, the piano is not going to play for you. You are a virtuoso, not a jelly-handed monkey, now start here and play."

The music starts.

"No, no, no. No! Why are you holding back! Are you SCARED of the piano? Set it on fire; attack it if you must!"

The teacher brings his hands down onto the keys and rams them in a set of violently nonsensical chords. The false notes ring in the room,

and all is still.

Aoko nods at the pedals of the piano, eyes quiet and hard, and begins playing once more.

-

Kuroba Kaito passes by their window and hears the discordant keys of the teacher. It doesn't sound like any song, and he grows curious enough to migrate to the edge of the window and hitch himself up the sill, drinking in—

(_'who are rebuilt and weaved through with something strange and beautiful called—'_)

_There are synonyms for music._

He drinks.

…_Through the windows is where anyone—any_thing_—happens. The piano faces the window, and he faces the piano. It's sun and glass and sound and he's grinning, because, well, because it's a glorious feeling, when everything is shining._


End file.
